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Staff Pick

The Antidote

by Karen Russell

'Karen Russell is one in a million' New York Times
From the Pulitzer shortlisted author, an astounding novel about magic, memory and land set America's Dust Bowl.

Visit The Antidote of Uz - a prairie witch who can keep your memories safe. Speak into her emerald-green earhorn, and your secrets, your shames, your private joys, will leave your mind and enter hers.

But after the great dust storm that flattens wheatfields, buries houses and kills a newlywed couple just a few feet from their car, the Antidote wakes up empty - as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever find out, her life will be in danger.

To the Antidote's surprising defence come a farmer, his basketball-playing niece and a Black photographer with her time-travelling camera. Apart, they run from the memories that have brought them to this lonely brink. Together, they face down the tornado coming their way.

The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation's forgetting - theft, dispossession, wilful blindness, passed on generation to generation. The Dust Bowl echo with warnings of our own time, daring to challenge us with what might have been - and what still could be.

'A brilliant writer with an amazing imagination' The Times

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Pages:

400

Published:

Mar 2025

Format

Paperback

Publisher

Penguin Random House

Imprint

Chatto & Windus

ISBN:

9781784745646



'Karen Russell is one in a million'
New York Times

From the Pulitzer shortlisted author, an astounding novel about magic, memory and land set America's Dust Bowl.

Visit The Antidote of Uz - a prairie witch who can keep your memories safe. Speak into her emerald-green earhorn, and your secrets, your shames, your private joys, will leave your mind and enter hers.

But after the great dust storm that flattens wheatfields, buries houses and kills a newlywed couple just a few feet from their car, the Antidote wakes up empty - as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever find out, her life will be in danger.

To the Antidote's surprising defence come a farmer, his basketball-playing niece and a Black photographer with her time-travelling camera. Apart, they run from the memories that have brought them to this lonely brink. Together, they face down the tornado coming their way.

The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation's forgetting - theft, dispossession, wilful blindness, passed on generation to generation. The Dust Bowl echo with warnings of our own time, daring to challenge us with what might have been - and what still could be.



'A brilliant writer with an amazing imagination' The Times

$38.00

A thought-provoking piece of speculative historical fiction, transforming aspects of American history into folklore while still examining the many wrongs of that history. This dust-bowl epic won't disappoint. (A pity about the awful cover.)

Jo's avatarJo, Unity Books auckland
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